


Love Like An Inferno

by MyHeartBurnsThereToo



Series: My Heart Burns There, Too [2]
Category: IT (2019), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Adult Themes, F/M, Fluff, Mentions of past abuse, Romance, but not “E” worthy, things get pretty steamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-18 19:55:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20644769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyHeartBurnsThereToo/pseuds/MyHeartBurnsThereToo
Summary: It’s been a week since the final confrontation with IT and Ben and Beverly are ready to take the next step in their relationship.Mostly ready.





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

_“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep _

_because reality is finally better than _

_your dreams.” _

_— Dr. Seuss _

His kisses were liquid fire, molten and consuming and hot enough to _burn. _Beverly felt the inferno, pressed tightly against her with its heat seeping in, warming her from the inside out. The gentle flutter of his tongue against hers, the sharp angles and hard muscles of his body surrounding her completely. And yet, despite how deeply they were kissing and how completely they were pressed together, Ben was still achingly gentle with her. The hands that had started so chastely on her waist had parted, one resting cautiously on her hip and one cupping her face with the upmost tenderness and care.

It was different. This act—or the act that would follow an embrace this passionate—was always harsh and brutal. Tom’s hands weren’t soft like this, guarding her like she was something precious and fragile. He was brutish and rough, vocal about his needs, and oblivious to hers. Ben though… he was wrapped around her like a human shield, his touches sure but always hesitant like he was waiting for consent. No, not _like _he was waiting for consent. He _was _waiting for consent. His tongue didn’t force its way into her mouth as his hands held her head still, instead he brushed it against the bottom of her lower lip, asking permission each time. He was careful and attentive, quickly zeroing in on the spots that made her groan with approval. The sensation was drugging, deep and heady in the best way possible, her fingers creeping up his shirt and deftly popping the first button.

Ben pulled away suddenly and their lips separated with a wet sound that made her head spin. Immediately, she leaned up to bring him back down and his grip on her waist tightened slightly. “Bev, we need to stop. For a minute. I need a minute.” His eyes were a burnt gold in the dim light in the living room of their suite, dark with a passion and lust that she felt coiled tight in the pit of her stomach.

“Why? Are you okay?” Her voice was strained and breathless, and the way those eyes darkened showed that he had noticed it as well. Quickly, the very tip of his tongue came out to wet his red and swollen lips, and Beverly made a sound of protest at the sight of it. Far quicker than she would have liked, the inferno inside of her was cooling down and that was the last thing she wanted. The horrors that they had faced a week ago were blurred and indistinct when Ben’s lips were pressed against hers and she _needed _that.

His mouth moved but no words came out. She could read the struggle in his eyes, the lust at war with the coherence that was fighting its way to the surface. Painfully, she took a slight step back and flushed bright red at the way her body vehemently protested the small space. It couldn’t have been more than four inches, but it might as well have been an entire ocean with the way her mind had rebelled. The look he shot her was grateful, if agonized, and when he tried again to speak his voice gained the traction it had lacked before. “We’re going too fast. All of this—too fast. Its only been a week and I don’t want you to have _any _regrets.”

Beverly frowned at that, his words sinking in slowly through the molasses of her scattered thoughts. “I wouldn’t regret it. I could never regret anything that I did with you. Not to mention, I was the one who jumped you.” And the image was still beautifully vibrant in her mind’s eye, the tiniest grin tugging at the corner of his mouth as he held up the takeaway containers from some diner across the street. That small, proud smile and the scent of bacon and maple syrup had sent her flying across the room, into his open arms; unbelievably happy and completely in love. Ben didn’t seem to have a response for that, but his wide eyes and completely helpless expression were enough. “We can stop, if you want. But if you want to stop because you think I’ll regret it, I won’t. I couldn’t.” The look he shot her then was purely carnal, dark, hot and heavy and Beverly felt shivers crawl up her spine because of it. “Okay correction,” she stated quickly, feeling her heart start to hammer against the confines of her chest and heat pool low in her stomach. “We can stop as long as you never give me that look again because that was _wildly_ unfair.”

Ben huffed out a strained laugh, his head shaking back and forth like he was trying to clear it. “If you're sure, we don’t have to stop. I just didn’t want to push you for something you weren’t really ready for.” He was perfect. The paralyzing love and tenderness in his eyes, the soft curve of his lips and the earnestness that practically dripped from his form spoke of pure devotion. It was maddening, to see so much adoration in the infinite pools of his eyes, a fierce dedication that she wasn’t at all sure that she’d earned. He looked at her like she was some sort of deity, someone worthy of a devotion this pure. Soft and so achingly _gentle_ his hands came up to cup her cheeks, the pads of his thumbs wiping away the tears that had managed to escape. “Beverly? What’s wrong?” A kiss to the palm of his left had made the line between his brows smooth and she pressed her cheek deeper into his hold, not trusting herself to speak.

They weren’t tears of sorrow, or grief. Not now. They were tears of healing, and joy. Tears that welcomed the end of a nightmare and celebrated the beginning of a dream, of her dream. They were proof of the many battles, the gruesome war, the centuries that she had aged in the span of a month. And rather than her unwilling return to normal, they were tears for her new normal. For Ben and his drugging kisses, for his laugh and the sound of his voice. They were for his love, his unyielding, unwavering, incomprehensible, pure love. “You're just perfect. And I'm so lucky.” Her voice came out watery and choked, seven words forced past the lodge of feelings stuck in her throat.

He pulled a face at that, his lips pursing and eyebrows drawing low over his eyes. There was a glimmer of almost childlike glee in his eyes though, a spark of innocent delight even as he shook his head. “Other way around, Bev. You are the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met. Your strength is staggering, rivaled only by your bravery. And your eyes, like when the sun first rises on a forest canopy, an endless myriad of green. You are kind—so _incredibly_ kind—and pure of heart, as beautiful on the inside as you are on the outside.”

“Kiss me.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them, and she found that she didn’t mind in the slightest. Ben looked startled for half a second before he lunged, surrounding her completely once again. With the electric feeling of his lips on hers, the inferno that had been reduced to smoldering coals roared back to life with the strength of a wildfire. Beverly moaned into the kiss and Ben broke away with a sharp gasp and moved to kiss along the line of her jaw and down her throat. A gentle tug on his hair brought his lips back to hers, where they slipped into place like magnets. Her fingers once again found the buttons on his shirt and undid them as quickly as she could with shaking fingers. The inferno had morphed into a full-fledged supernova, and Beverly groaned as she separated their lips. “Bed. Bed now, please.”

Ben complied with alacrity, his hands sliding down her body and urging her to wrap her legs around his waist. While he focused of getting them into the bedroom of their hotel suite, Beverly trailed kisses down the side of his throat and over the sharp line of his jaw bone, eagerly retuning the attention that he had given her earlier. They fell onto the bed in a mess of tangled limbs, him cradling the back of her head and her completely focused on keeping their lips fused together. “I love you, Beverly Marsh. I love you. I always have and I always will.” His voice was a breathless, ragged gasp, airy because he hadn’t even taken a full breath before he had spoken. He looked at her with such worshipful adoration, his eyes half closed with pleasure and his lips once again red and glistening. Beverly reached up to cup his cheek, biting hard at the corner of her lip when his head immediately turned to press a loving kiss to her palm.

“I love you too, Ben. I love you so much.” His smile turned soft and dreamy before he swooped down and kissed her hard, desperate and needy. His teeth tugged on her lower lip and she felt herself absolutely melt into the mattress, her mind going fuzzy with pleasure. Those medicinal lips of his were trailing down the slope of her neck and into the dip of her collarbone where he stayed, transfixed.

“Beverly. You’re sure about this?”

She almost snorted at that, and she would have if she’d had the mind to do anything other than nod vigorously. Her tongue felt pasted to the roof of her mouth and when his questing fingers slid under the fabric of her shirt and stroked her quivering stomach, the glue was suddenly gone. “Sure! Yes, yes, yes. I’m sure. Please, Ben.” And that was all it took for those fingers to gently undo the buttons. Each new patch of skin he bared was treated to the lightest of kisses, starting low on her stomach and working his way back up to her lips.

“You are the embodiment of perfection, a warrior born in an inferno and raised in the chaos of its destruction, a woman with a core of steel and the bravery and grace of a lioness. The beauty and elegance of a fairytale princess and the spirit of a knight. The fire and determination of a dragon—”

“Ben,” her voice came out an embarrassingly breathy groan, his words and teasing touches driving her to the brink of sanity. Every nerve in her body sang, buzzing with electricity and desire as her muscles tensed in anticipation. “Love. I love you.” Those brushing fingers trailed their way up over her hips and down her arms and without meaning to, Beverly flinched.

He stopped immediately, eyes wide and panicked. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, but her voice once again failed her. The bruises Tom had left with his belt were all but faded, a soft green with the smallest purpled edge surrounding them. Ben noticed, his eyes trailing the length of the marks before he dipped his head and let his lips skim them, featherlight. “Pennywise?”

Her throat felt tight, like she was suffocating, drowning in the weight of all the memories. She could lie, and agree, and they could go back to what they had been doing, before the past had reared its ugly head yet again. And even as she had the thought, she dismissed it. Ben was far too important to her for that. “No. Before Pennywise.”

His lips stopped their skimming.

In fact, his whole body froze, hovering just over her. Slowly, his gaze met hers and the darkness in it now was nothing like it had been just a few moments ago. “Before Pennywise?” There was a sharp note of something dangerous in his voice, something dark and terrifying that made her heart beat faster for reasons far less pleasurable than before. Like an eyeless hurricane, lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled in the eyes of the statue above her.

“I told you that my husband and I were separating. I never told you why.” Ben’s jaw locked, fury pouring out in palpable waves, his mind somewhere a million miles away from her and their bed. “Hey, come back to me. He’s gone and… and you’re here. I-I don’t want to remember him right now. You can make me forget. I _need_ you to make me forget.”

Some of the sanity returned to his eyes at the sound of her voice, the fury banked but still visible behind the avalanche of love. “You are the strongest woman, I swear. I’m in awe of you.” Compared to all the poetry he had spoken to her earlier, the line was rather plain. But that didn’t make its impact any less profound.

“Enough distractions. Make me forget.” Before she could wince at how unintentionally demanding she had sounded, Ben’s form once again covered her, and she had been wrong before. So, so wrong. He hadn’t been being gentle with her before, _this _was gentle, reverent. The feeling of his bare skin pressed so lightly against her own, the half muffled words of love that he muttered against the landscape of her body. And then his tongue slid back into her mouth and she lost the ability to think at all.


	2. Chapter 2

Consciousness swam to the surface slowly at first, bubbling and flowing in a steady stream of sounds and sensations. There were fingers in her hair, stroking their way down to her shoulders where they pressed lightly against the knotted muscle at the base of her neck before skimming their way back up onto her scalp. The motion was repetitive and decidedly constant, hypnotizing and distracting her momentarily. Sound followed next, the gentle crackling of a fireplace trailed shortly by a steady beating heart right against her ear. Beverly yawned and let her bent legs stretch out the length of the couch, grimacing when the locked muscles tightened even more in complaint. “I fell asleep.”

Ben snickered, softly, and maneuvered the both of them so he could easily reach her sore legs with his hands. “I hadn’t noticed.” There was a playful lilt to his voice that made her grin, but before she could gather her thoughts to comment on it, those hands of his started working her calves. And as always, every touch to her skin was done with a fluidity and confidence that he completely deserved to have. It was bliss, the purest kind of pleasure imaginable, and for a long moment she let herself get lost in the feeling, staring at the flickering licks of flame that had were notably smaller than she remembered.

“Okay, what’s your deal? Did you train with a master masseur?” His thumbs didn’t falter in the small circles they were pressing into her calves, but his lips did quirk upward in a grin of amusement.

Still though, he at least pretended to give her question some thought before finally shrugging. “I don’t know. I ran track all through high school and most of college, if that clarifies anything.” Somehow, she couldn’t picture that. For all that he was fit and toned, the idea of him donning a uniform and willingly subjecting himself to intense physical and mental stress that came with track didn’t stick. It was a conversation for a later time, though.

“I’ll give you that for your strength, but I was talking more skill there, Ben. Where did you learn how to give professional grade massages?” To her surprise, the very tips of his ears turned pink and Beverly watched in shocked pleasure as that blush made its way down to his chest, framed perfectly by the open collar and undone buttons of his white shirt. He shifted, barely, and the downy soft leather of the couch squeaked with the slight movement. “Oh, there’s a story here.”

His snicker was more subdued this time, not much louder than a huff. “I didn’t train with a master masseur. I didn’t train with anyone. You just…” The words seemed to get stuck in his throat, and Ben bit the right corner of his bottom lip, a nervous habit of his that she had seen more than once that had the unintentional side effect of driving her crazy. “You are perfect. And you deserve anything and everything that you could ever want, for all the bullshit the world has thrown at you. You have the purest heart, the strongest will of anyone I’ve ever known. If rubbing your shoulders or stroking your hair can bring even the slightest sense of comfort, then I would consider myself lucky—as I do—to be able to do something for you.”

Beverly swallowed, thickly, and sat up to cup his face in her hands. It wasn’t a new feeling, to be rendered speechless by the sheer amount of love gleaming in his eyes. The way he looked at her made something inside of her, long hoarse from its incessant screaming just—_freeze_. Those whispers were woven into her soul, yet somehow, Ben had managed to gently grasp those braided threads and start to undo them. There was nothing she wanted more than to be the version of herself that she saw reflecting in those deep sable eyes. “You are far more than I deserve, Ben Hanscom.” Fate fortuned the brave, though, and she was learning. A painful, slow process, sure—but she was _trying_, and that had to count for something.

“There are no people who have no scars, just people better at hiding them. You don’t live on despite your past, you live on _because _of it. You don’t hide. And the courage it takes to soldier on, through everything, is superhuman. As are you. If just for a moment, you could see yourself the way I do—see the warrior I see—there would be no room in your mind for doubt. Those voices would release their poisons and you would know nothing but peace.” He raised his hands until he mirrored her, cupping her face, brushing away the rebel tears that had managed to spill down despite her best attempt at holding them. “If I could, I would hunt down each and every voice, to relieve you of that burden. As it stands, all I can offer is myself. For whatever you need, be it a sounding board or someone to hold you.”

Tom’s voice was loud, ever present, in the back of her mind. It had festered overtime, his tendencies towards physical and emotional violence, stinging slaps and venomous words. For years, it had reigned in the innermost layer of her psyche, untethered and unchecked, but Ben had stopped that. Without her even realizing it, standing in the pouring rain with the smell of Chinese food and inevitable doom surrounding her, wet clothes clinging to her shaking figure. New bruises blooming. He’d stopped it, with that first hug. And days later, with that first kiss. All that was left now was her own terrified ricochet of what she’d been conditioned to think, and even from a thousand miles away, he was still controlling her.

No more. Ben’s eyes had shadowed with worry, his brow creasing and mouth opening like he wanted to apologize, and Beverly stopped him with a single shake of her head. There was no stability in what they were doing, jumping from city to city, hotel room to hotel room. It was an excellent diversion, the faded ivory walls of their hotel room, winking with splashes of yellow and orange. A pretty, peaceful diversion. But a diversion none the less. The real world was watching with impatient eyes, narrowing more and more with every passing day. “You asked me to stay. That first night. Did you mean—?”

“Yes!” Those eyes that had been so fraught with worry before were translucent now, bright and eager, shining with a light she hadn’t seen since her spontaneous, underwater kiss. Then they widened in realization, and Ben pursed his lips. “Sorry. I'm sorry. You were still—”

A kiss stopped his apology midsentence, his lips still parted in momentary surprise, and Beverly leaned a hairsbreadth closer, pressing against him before dropping her forehead against his. They stayed that way for a long moment, sharing the same space, the same breath, and she drew strength from their embrace. “I have to go back to Chicago.” As expected, Ben jerked his head back, wide eyes searching her face in quick, frantic sweeps. “These past few weeks have been everything, Ben. To recover and just let ourselves mourn but we can’t keep hiding from the world. _I _can’t keep hiding from the world.” The heartbroken confusion in his eyes made her curse slightly under her breath, frustration welling somewhere deep in her stomach. “You’ve been so good to me, putting your whole life on pause because I wasn’t ready to face the world and all its questions, but I can’t ask you to do that anymore. I won’t—”

“Bev, you haven’t asked me for a single thing—”

“And that makes it worse, Ben! Because you did all of this for me and I never _asked _you to! You knew that I needed time before even I did. You… you never forgot.” The unknown emotion that had fizzed heedlessly just beneath the surface of her skin. Guilt. Irrational, irrevocable, all consuming guilt. “I forgot about you, Ben. You never did. I—” It seemed so inconceivable, that the man in front of her had been a stranger two months ago. She could have walked past him a million times and would have been completely oblivious to it.

“That wasn’t your fault, Bev. _Everyone _forgot.” And before she could reiterate her point, he pressed a lingering kiss to her forehead that made her eyes flutter shut. “I held on to that yearbook page, carried it around with me everywhere I went for years. You saw me, even back then, when we were just kids. I was hopelessly infatuated with you, the kindest girl I’d ever met. That feeling never went away, and now I'm in love with you, the strongest woman I've ever known. Its not your fault, none of it. You can’t blame yourself for that.” Another kiss to her forehead and a gentle nudge made her shift until she was sitting with her back against his chest, his arms wrapped protectively around her. Their winking flames had been reduced to smoldering, bright orange coals. They painted the bottom half of the walls a scorched amber, the top a faded indigo. The sun had set, then.

She hadn’t noticed.

His words were the truth, she knew. Still hard to accept after everything, hard to believe after decades of being called worthless. “I have to go back,” she repeated, leaning firmer into his embrace. “We need to do this the right way, with lawyers and attorneys. I don’t want any part of his life touching mine. I want to be free.” Beverly could feel him nodding, his lips pressing against the top of her head. “I want to be free, and then I want to be with you.”

A slight hitch in his breath, and those arms tightening slightly was her reaction. “I love you, Beverly.” Ben’s voice was subdued, keenly aware of the mood that had settled over them. “And all I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is your happiness. Whatever you need, whatever makes you feel happy. Happy and safe.”

Beverly grinned—beamed—relaxed completely against him, curled up, limbs hopelessly tangled together. Everything wasn’t okay, not just yet. There were still battles to fight, papers to sign. Still monsters to slay. But _safe… _safe was easy. Ben was safe. And looking into the dying coals, watching that deep indigo slink down the wall; it was the happiest she’d been in a long time.


End file.
